Me in front of the DJ at Helm Bar sydney

Helm Bar Sydney in Front of the DJ

 

I’m a third party invite to a birthday at Helm Bar – and this weekend I’ve been so sick and its been pissing down buckets of rain the past few days as well as tonight, so I can only manage to go to a bar tonight, and not a club for a review – but regardless there is a dancefloor… so here we go!

Saturdays @ Helm Bar
Assessment Time: 11pm – 12:30am
Address: Aquarium Whart, Wheat Road, Darling Harbour Sydney
Dress Code / Door Policy: Smart dress code applies. I wore a collared shirt, vest, jeans.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: Free, its just a bar.
Guestlist: None
Inside: One bar for the entire area split into two outdoor regions and the indoor dance area. One outdoor area is corderned off for the birthday for 60 people with stools and tables. Same with the other area. The inside dancefloor can hold maybe 150 people or so. DJ area is to the left corner, placed outside. Outside there are views of darling harbour, but mostly boats.
Cloak Room: None
Bar: 1 bar
Music: House, rnb – all modern contemporary commercial music
Crowd: General crowd were all dressed nice but hard to tell – mostly caucasian early to mid 20s crowd.
Atmosphere: It’s raining heaps outside, so the atmosphere isn’t so good on the dancefloor. It’s not too busy and not too dead, but its ‘bustling’ near the bar area.
360 Video
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Fridays @ Bungalow 8: 8th January 2010

On January 8, 2010, in Bungalow 8, House, by J T

Was here for a friend’s farewell.. so here we go!

Fridays @ Bungalow 8
Assessment Time: 10.30pm-12.15am
Address: 3 Lime St Sydney
Dress Code / Door Policy: You must look sharp, nice dress shoes, pants and collared shirt are a minimum and should be enough to get in. No large groups of men. Avoid jeans and casual shoes such as chucks. I barely got in with black runners tonight, only because the rest of my outfit was pretty snazzy, I was alone in line and I was sober.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: Free
Guestlist: None, so if you get ‘guestlisted’, you’re deemed not good enough for the club based on your appearance
Inside: One large bar, with small dance area and DJ inside. Outside courtyard area surrounds the perimeter of the bar. Pretty ‘spacy’ outside.
Cloak Room: None
Music: Mix of old school house and modern house. It’s not too hard, and pretty casual but good to dance to. Oh a very esoteric description there, but it was pretty generic safe music to play for a crowd like this.
Crowd: Older (and better behaved) crowd – people in their 20’s, 30s.  Mostly white.
Entertainment: No extra entertainment besides the DJ
Atmosphere: Strict dress code makes the place look good. Atmosphere was pretty much lets drink and dance, and enjoy the water views of Darling Harbour.
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We finished a wedding out west. I am in my tuxedo and I feel awesome. I was also smashed. The city was 1 hour away. I didn’t care. I was in a tux – We were going clubbing!! Luckily I had some friends at Home Nightclub…

About Home Nightclub:
Location: Cockle Bay wharf, Darling Habour
Website: http://www.homesydney.com
Inside: All rooms except the mid-wall room was open. Main room on the floor, with upstairs balcony area and 2nd bar. Outdoor smoking area connected to this. A 2nd smaller room on the 2nd level. 3rd level are 2 extra rooms. This place is a maze of rooms.

About Homemade Saturdays:
Assessment Time: 1.30am-3.30am
Dress Code: Casual ok. I was wearing my tuxedo from the wedding. You also get fingerprinted and photo scanned on the way in.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: $25
Guestlist: See website
Cloakroom: Yes, at the bar near at the DJ eng.
Bar: $12 yaberbombs.
Music: House in the main room. Can’t complain, all the commercial house tunes were being played. Actually it was executed quite well here. There was also a saxophone player to add another dimension to the music – much like the Bongo players at Bungalow  and Cargo Bar.

Supporting saxaphone player used to great effect with the music

Supporting saxaphone player used to great effect with the music

RNB room – RNB of course – but I wasn’t there long enough.

Party tunes and retro at the top level. They seemed to have combined all the rooms into one major huge event.
Crowd: Mixed – Asians, Euros
Atmosphere: Party and vibing in the main room. However the other rooms seemed pretty dead. Especially the RNB room as nobody was there – it was the most dead room of them all. There were a hundred other places where you could have your proper rnb fix – and Home Nightclub doesn’t seem to be popular right now as the place to be for it.

360 from the main podium

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Timeline:
Kicked off the podium by the sexist DJ
There are girls up at the front dancing. Drunk old me wants a dance too! I went up and danced for a good 50 seconds. Then I hear a:

DJ: “OI!”
James: (turns around)
DJ: “GET OFF THE STAGE – NOW!!!”
James: (jumps off stage)

Man.. what a cold DJ. Given, he probably has a lot of drunk guys coming up onto his stage, but fuck you anyway Mr DJ, even if you played really good beats. A minute later I have my female friend go up and dance, and there was no objections. Total sexism!!!

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“No” I say….  “I hate pumphouse!” I say…
It was Saturday night and my friends really wanted to go here. i didn’t. I couldn’t ditch them.. sigh – I wonder if it’s better now… here we go!

Static @ Pumphouse Review
Assessment Time: 12:15 – 2am
Dress Code: Casual ok. Everybody here dresses up in their dancing rnb/hip hop gear. Baggy pants, MJ jackets, and hats are the norm.
Cover Charge: $25. Discount on guestlist before 11pm I think.
Music: RNB and hip-hop. When I mention hip-hop, I mean lots of rapping, and lots of rnb songs which you can dance your heart to. It was good tonight.
Atmosphere: Average. The place wasn’t packed nor was it empty… in essence it was a bit disappointing as there were people on the floor, but upstairs there were only about 15 people, looking down. you could easily find a place to sit down here.

Inside: 2 square podiums for the dancers, and wannabe dancers, dancefloor to hold a good 100 or so people. Upstairs is the DJ area and another small dance area, but nobody really goes up there.
Walkthrough video:
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360 Video
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Entertainment: Female podium dancers. Good stuff.

Podium dancers, and a MJ fan with his red jacket

Podium dancers, and a MJ fan with his red jacket

Bar: No shots after midnight. Booyah. This was a huge dealbreaker for my friends tonight. We wanted a place to have shots all night!

Crowd at static @ pumphouse

Crowd at static @ pumphouse

Timeline
Again, everybody is a great dancer.

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Friday RNB Special @ Home Nightclub

A small mention on the radio of an RNB night on Friday at Home Nightclub. The last time I went to a RNB event at Home bar, it went off! Sounds good, so I dragged my friends along. Here we go!

Assessment Time: 10:30pm – 12:30pm
Address: Cockle Bay Wharf
Door Policy / Dress Code: Casual ok
Cover Charge / Entry Fee: $20. $10 on guestlist.
Guestlist: Unknown, but one was available
Inside: Only the main room was open for tonight’s one-off RNB special. Main floor could hold a few hundred people.
Bar: $12 Yagerbombs
Music: RNB. Typical RNB tunes playing. Regulars to sublime trance event only had the upstairs rooms tonight.
Crowd: There was nobody here, but the crowd that was here, was Mixed. Indian, Asian, Black, Aussie, Euro. Our group represented the only asians.
Atmosphere: Dead.

Timeline
Home nightclub – an empty shell
There was no line for our RNB event. Bad sign, but it was early. We walked into the main floor and this is what we saw:

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A friend invited me to a little uni end of semester party – with a Pajama theme – sounded great! So I dressed up as a sailor.

U n’ I Pajama Party @ Docks Hotel
Assessment Time: 10:30pm – 2.30am
Entry Fee/ Cover Charge: $25 prepaid, $30/$35 at the door. Alternatively you could have come to Docks Hotel before 9.30 for drinks without paying entry and hung around for dance later.
Occurrence: Once off. It was U n’ I’s (the organisers) first event.
Crowd: Dominantly Asian, and almost entirely of uni students.
Music: RNB, House. The typical Sydney RNB DJ’s attended tonight. Sefu.. and Ace and some other ones for the main area. In the side room/area there was also RNB, but the DJ here also mixed it up with some House music. The King of Pop died earlier today, so there was also a 4  song Michael Jackson tribute in the middle and at the end of the night, which was nice of the DJs. A bit of Jackson 5, and then some MJ songs.
Atmosphere: Pretty good. Crowded as people were let in. Most stayed until 1.30.
Entertainment: Dance off, and an all girls pillow fight. Videos of the pillow fight later

360 Video Inside:
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What an acronym!! The University of New South Wales  Business Society ‘Be Sexy’ dance!!! Try saying that 10 times. My boss has been encouraging me to use my annual leave, so I took a Friday off and went with a friend on Thursday night!

About Home Bar

Address: 101 Cockle Bay Wharf, Darling Harbour (opposite the IMAX theatre)
Website: http://www.homesydney.com
Inside: Entry is via their side door. It is not accessible via the front bar entrance. When you enter, there is a little foyer with two openings. On the right opening is entry to the main room. The other is a set of stairs that lead up.

The main room is quite large both in terms of dimensions and height. You enter from the back where the bar resides. At the back is a technician (yes, a light and possibly sound technician) The DJ is at the front. The huge Shiny sublime logo hangs as a modern day chandelier. Overlooking the main room on 3 sides is a balcony setup where people are peering down Upstairs is another bar and the balcony peering over downstairs. On Level 2 there is a small room playing trance music. another set of stairs around the bar leads you to level 3 –  set of stairs and a tiny room resides where slow house plays. It’s not crowded and it’s quite good music, but it was dead as throughout the night.

The main room of Home Nightclub. Taken from the 2nd level balcony

The main room of Home Nightclub. Taken from the 2nd level balcony

About BSXC
A once off event, possibly once a year for the UNSW BSOC.
Entry: $10 (1st round), $15 (2nd round), $20 (3rd round). $25 at the door. A relative bargain.
Crowd: Dominantly Asian. It was UNSW, after all.
Atmosphere: Main room – very good. Use of MC had the crowd continually going. Trance room – Small, but there was no pretentiousness when dancing here. House room upstairs – Dead most of the night, but for me, seemed to be the best room, I liked the beats, and I loved the freedom to dance, compared to downstairs were it was packed to the rafters.

Entertainment: I caught a glimpse of some dancers at the front. Don’t know if there were any other forms of entertainment. It was a good way to break things up. No podium dancers at this place, nor podiums to speak of.

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